It's all due to economics. Nothing else really matters.
I'd say the exact opposite, economics (especially in the way you're talking about it) has utterly miniscule role to play in history,in Rome's case it is a symptom of other problems, not the root cause.
I don't believe you know very much about Rome if you think welfare was even in the top 100 reasons why it collapsed.
Saying "Rome went into debt and ran out of money so their economic system is bad" is incredibly short sighted and is ignoring the actual reasons why their economy failed so you can blame it on welfare and then somehow tie that to modern ideas of socialism, that weren't even invented until hundreds of years after the Eastern Roman Empire fell even using the latest possible date (1453, fall of Constantinople).
Economics is everything.
The only (with the exception of the religion or "glory") reason to invade another country is to seize their land, their assets, and gain control of the tax-paying population. If the land has no people there, no town, no resources, no anything. No-one cares about it.
Just because marx and the modern definition of socialism didn't exist until 1453, doesn't mean that it never occurred before in history.
Rome failed because they ran out of money. We can debate WHY they ran out of money, but if they didn't have the expense of providing food, entertainment, and all the other benefits that they got, to the people of Rome they wouldn't have had to hyperinflate their currency to pay for it all.
(post is archived)